Billed as a Big Data Discovery Experience as a service, HP said it allows customers to "determine the value of their new use cases and big data sets" before committing to large capital investments.

HP said the new service, which is based on its Haven big data platform, allows customers to "engage HP's data scientists and rapidly develop solutions that can be deployed either on premise or in the cloud."

"It's a test drive with data models, connectors [and] accelerators coupled with industry expertise, data scientist and technical expertise to enable discovery," said Ashim Bose, a senior director in HP's Enterprise Services group. "Once the business value is established, the findings can be implemented in a production environment."

HP does have "plans to move into SaaS [software-as-a-service] offers with a focus on the key industries and domains we play in," said Bose.

Chris Case, president and CEO of Sequel Data Systems, an HP enterprise partner based in Austin, Texas, said he is looking forward to working with HP to sell big data as a service rather than an on-premise, capital expenditure-based solution. "We should be able to sell this just like we do an agent model with the public sector [HP] business," he said.

"An on-demand big data-as-a-service offering is much more attractive for a customer than buying a multimillion-dollar solution," said Case. "There is going to be a finite number of customers that would want or need a multimillion-dollar big data solution."

Case said he is seeing a lot more customers embracing the on-demand computing model, preferring to buy information technology as an operating expense-based service rather than a massive capital expenditure on-premise solution.

"Lots of customers are looking to go to an on-demand model," he said. "It's easier for them to go to the board of directors and get approval for an OpEx-based service, paying a monthly bill rather than a single big capital expenditure."

While a large group of EMC's investors continue to hope that EMC will sell parts of itself to create more clear valuation for them, EMC is likely heading in the opposite direction by considering more acquisitions, according to a top analyst.